How a major crisis can herald huge leaps in knowledge
‘Scientists across the entire world are working to one goal’
YESTERDAY, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson told an international video conference that we face a battle of “humanity against the virus”. How right that is – and the battle has started.
According to Professor Nicholas Hart, one of the doctors who saved Mr Johnson’s life, “Covid-19 is this generation’s polio.”
Some readers may remember 1952, when Jonas Salk developed the first effective vaccine against that devastating and highly infectious disease.
Today, most of the world is polio-free. Even as late as 1988 there were some 350,000 cases. By 2018 that figure had been reduced to just 33.
So Prof Hart is correct. But in another sense, we have to hope that the story of the polio vaccine is not repeated – because it took decades first to be developed and then to be used. Let’s pray the Covid-19 vaccine doesn’t take that long.
One of the ironies of history is that great crises can spark huge breakthroughs in knowledge and achievement. Teams of scientists, for example, have come together at times of peril to pool their knowledge to achieve the near impossible.
In the Second World War, advances in physics led to fears that Germany would develop an atomic bomb.
IN RESPONSE came the Manhattan Project, when some of the world’s greatest physicists collaborated and beat the Nazis in developing an effective bomb. Similarly, the work at Bletchley Park by the country’s greatest mathematicians helped crack the Germans’ Enigma code and changed the course of history.
In post-war peacetime, medical advances have been transformational. In 1945 male life expectancy in the UK was just over 65. Today it is almost 80. The discovery of the Double
Helix in 1953 – the structure of DNA – opened up the possibility of an entirely new form of medicine. Gene therapy has already made huge strides and over the next decade is likely to create astounding advances.
The work being done to develop a Covid-19 vaccine is equally awe-inspiring. Scientists across the entire world are working towards one goal.
There is no guarantee it will succeed. Quite the opposite – as with polio, it can take decades to develop a vaccine.
But the work being done reminds us of just what we are capable of as a species. This week a pilot programme in the UK is opening up another possible route out of the crisis.
It follows the case of South Korea, where lessons were learned from the spread of the SARS virus in the early years of the century, and the detection of Covid-19 early on prompted a nationwide “test, track and trace” scheme.
Anyone with symptoms was immediately tested. If they tested positive they were ordered to self-isolate. And anyone who had been in contact with them had to do the same.
That way the virus had little opportunity to spread.
To say it worked is an understatement. Out of a population of 60 million, just 252 have died – and the country has avoided the forced lockdown we have endured.
The NHS has been developing an app that will allow a similar approach here, not to avoid the disease taking off – we have missed that boat – but to ensure it does not re-emerge when we lift the lockdown.
THE app, to be launched on the Isle of Wight today, silently records – via a Bluetooth signal – everyone else we come into contact with who also has the app.
If we then develop symptoms, we inform the NHS which is then able, via the app (backed up by human tracers), to let anyone we have mixed with know about our infection, so that they too can self-isolate.
There are obvious problems, not least that some of those most vulnerable to infection – the elderly and those in care homes – are the least likely to have mobile phones.And unless the great majority of us download the app, it will not work. In Singapore, where a similar app has been available for a few weeks, just 20 per cent of people have downloaded it.
There have been objections that the app is an infringement of civil liberties, but well, most of us rather like the civil liberty conferred by being alive.
And there is always protest about new digital developments, such as the brilliant “GP at hand” NHS service, where your GP is an app, with video consultations with real doctors. I use this myself and can vouch for its efficiency.
There is no real upside to this pandemic. But just as previous crises have prompted leaps forward in knowledge, so Covid19 is certain to do the same. That should offer some comfort to us – however small.